WINE/DOSBox: Games I Have Running Now
In case you're at all curious about what I've gotten to work in Linux in terms of games that were made for DOS and Windows
:
DOSBox: The 7th Guest (GOG.com release made for Windows, but you can arse it to run in DOS as WINE attemps to throw it to DOSBox anyway in Ubuntu 12.04)
DOSBox: The 11th Hour: Sequel to the 7th Guest (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Runs Well)
DOSBox: Darkforces (Requires CD-ROM, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Perfect)
DOSBox: Doom (Perfect)
DOSBox: Doom II (Perfect)
DOSBox: Heretic (Perfect)
DOSBox: Lighthouse: The Dark Being (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect)
DOSBox: Llamatron (Perfect)
DOSBox: Pinball Fantasies (Perfect)
DOSBox: Quake (Perfect)
DOSBox: Relentless: Little Big Adventures of Twinsen (Requires CD-ROM, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Perfect)
DOSBox: Tombraider (Requires CD-ROM, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Perfect)
WINE: Sierra 3-D Creepnight Pinball (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect)
WINE: Sierra 3-D Ultra Pinball (Requires CD-ROM, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Good, music doesn't work. Investigating...)
WINE: The Bladerunner (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect)
WINE: Claw (Requires DVD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect)WINE: Daikatana (Good, a little glitchy but it was the same on Windows so...)
WINE: Diablo (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Good except main menu is not visible each time you run it)
WINE: Diablo II (Perfect)
WINE: Hexen II (Perfect)
WINE: Max Payne (Perfect but requires the real CD-ROM. ISO and BIN/CUE images fail)
WINE: Merriam-Webster's Spell Jam (This one is for my daughter. A nice virtual spelling bee and she's quite good at it :)
WINE: MYST I: RealMYST 3-D (Perfect)
WINE: MYST II: Riven (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Fair. Need to save constantly because in parts, the game can lock up. Going to try a reinstallation with PlayOnLinux. This was done just with the Ubuntu 12.04 system WINE which is version 1.4. It might work better with another version)
WINE: MYST III: Exile (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect)
WINE: MYST IV: Revelation (Perfect on primary screen, but on HDMI attached projector it fails complaining that it can't change the resolution/color depth. Even manually changing it to match fails... Temporal data: 020121216)
WINE: Pinball Addiction (Requires CD-ROM, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Perfect)
WINE: Quake II (Requires CD-ROM, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Fair. Save regularly because there is the occasional crash. Might try reinstallation with PlayOnLinux)
WINE: Slender - The Eight Pages (Perfect with WINE 1.5.13 which allows mouselook to work)
WINE: Timeshock! Pinball (Requires CD-ROM, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Fair. This table plays too fast because the code to the original game relies on the MS MCI CDDA subsystem to sync the board with the music tracks on the disc. It doesn't appear that this notion of timing works in WINE. Some recommendations for games playing too fast in WINE were to remove the CPU throttling module which is not possible with the standard Ubuntu kernel)
WINE: Tron 2.0 (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Good, but for some reason won't load my saved games transferred over from Win7. Causes out of memory errors. Need to investigate further)
WINE: Titanic: Adventure Out of Time (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect)
WINE: Unnreal (Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect)
WINE: Unreal: Game of the Year Edition (2000) (Perfect)
NATIVE: Doom III - Terrible as it requires either raw OSS or ALSA for sound and Ubuntu's implementation of Pulseaudio's ALSA/OSS emulation is not good enough or fast enough to work. This causes the rendering portions of the game to hang making it unplayable. When audio does work, it's crackly and glitchy. iD has no intention of writing a new Doom III engine for Linux. Ther is an IODoom3 project I'll have to keep my eye on. I need to test this one in WINE and see if it works any better. But that will be after I poke at ALSA in Ubuntu. I've learned enough on how to suspend Pulseaudio with 'pasuspend -- doom3' but it seems that raw ALSA does not work when Pulseaudio is suspended, so... NO applications that can talk to ALSA work. I can also get more granular control of Pulseaudio from 'pacmd', the CLI for Pulse. NOTE: I Love Pulseaudio and think it's an excellent design and not a needless layer as ALSA is far to basic to be of use for more complicated software.
At this point I'm thinking that Ubuntu leaves out some portions of ALSA which prevent applications from accessing devices. I can use 'alsamixer' to control the sound device, but as soon as I use 'pasuspend', and try to run an application pointed specifically at ALSA ('mplayer -ao alsa myvideo.mov') the first frame plays and it hangs like ALSA isn't there. So even though Pulse is suspended, I think either it's ALSA layer is still active, or the core ALSA subsystem is just incomplete in Ubuntu. One thing that leads me to think it's incomplete is that with 'pacmd' I was able to unload the ALSA module. But at that point NO audio worked. Needs more investigation.
NATIVE: Heretic II - (Requires CD-ROM for music, works with BIN/CUE disc image: Perfect. Amazingly this works in x86_64 even though it wasn't made to)
NATIVE: IOQuake3 - Requires CD-ROM, works with ISO disc image: Perfect, but... it only worked when I built it from source. The prebuilt version seemed to be missing the bots for single player mode. I pulled down the git repository and installed the needed build dependencies and built for x86_64. This also allows you to run the Quake III Team Arena expansion which I have. There appeared to be problems with the CD key check in Team Arena and I wound up editing the file in 'vim' to allow Team Arena to run. Still... the "Join" menu item is greyed out, so I can't join any single player and possibly multiplayer games. I might look and see if they have an IRC channel to bounce this issue off of at some point. A cool little bit of fallout from the release of the Quake 3 source into the FOSS world is that there are now a few other home grown games written using IOQuake3 as the backend. Go to the IOQuake3 project page for more info: http://ioquake3.org/
NOTE: I am aware that some of these games have/had native Linux ports and where possible I've tried to use native binaries/sources first. But in the world of 64-bit Ubuntu, a lot of those bits of code are broken and don't look like they will be fixed. Ever. In some of those cases, running in WINE or DOSBox actually worked. Also... some of these games that required the disc and would not run from an ISO or BIN/CUE image would only work with a NO-CD crack. Unfortunately.
NOTE 2: I generally used BIN/CUE format (generated using cdrdao and toc2cue commands) when I needed to get the Audio CD portion of the game in the image. This works amazingly well in DOSBox for any games that play music from track 1 on the CD-ROM. It works in WINE too if the applications either used standard MS calls for CDDA or, if they wrote their own that WINE can work with. For others in WINE it may not work at all. Use of BIN/CUE "just works" in DOSBox. For WINE, you need to use CDEmu. This is a set of kernel modules, a server and a client. The kernel module loads to provide a virtual host bus adapter (VHBA) or "SCSI adaptor in old school terms".
The 'cdemud' server then provides a certain number of virtual CD/DVD drives based on parameters passed to the server that are waiting for discs to be "loaded" into them. I set up six virtual drives by default each time a game is run and then kill the server when the game exits. You can also set up cdemud to run system wide, but I've noticed that there may be a memory leak as this eventually eats up all the RAM on my systems if there are no discs loaded. The cdemud server can accept a few different disc image formats, but I only cared about ISO and BIN/CUE. I believe it also supports Nero images from the version of Nero Burning ROM that was made for Linux.
Finally, the 'cdemu' client command is what "loads or unloads the disc into/out of a drive". It can also check the status of the loaded discs:
cdemu status
or
cdemu load 0 /mnt/data/CDServ/riven-d1.iso
cdemu load 1 /mnt/data/CDServ/riven-d2.iso
or
cdemu unload 0
Since a /dev/srN device is created for each "drive", Ubuntu's implementation of Nautilus autodetects the loaded disc and presents it in the UI. You see these nice CD icons show up on Dash and you see the CD icons show up on the desktop just as they would on a Mac. For access to CDEmu on Ubuntu I just added their PPA and used apt-get to install. Other distros are also supported so check out the CDEmu project page: http://cdemu.sourceforge.net/project/#sf